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Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

Amazon S3 is a repository for Internet data. Amazon S3 provides access to reliable,
fast, and
inexpensive data storage infrastructure. It is designed to make web-scale computing
easy by
enabling you to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from within Amazon
EC2 or
anywhere on the web. Amazon S3 stores data objects redundantly on multiple devices
across
multiple facilities and allows concurrent read or write access to these data objects
by many
separate clients or application threads. You can use the redundant data stored in
Amazon S3 to
recover quickly and reliably from instance or application failures.

Amazon EC2 uses Amazon S3 for storing Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). You use AMIs for
launching EC2
instances. In case of instance failure, you can use the stored AMI to immediately
launch
another instance, thereby allowing for fast recovery and business continuity.

Amazon EC2 also uses Amazon S3 to store snapshots (backup copies) of the data volumes.
You can use
snapshots for recovering data quickly and reliably in case of application or system
failures. You can also use snapshots as a baseline to create multiple new data volumes,
expand the size of an existing data volume, or move data volumes across multiple
Availability Zones, thereby making your data usage highly scalable. For more information
about using data volumes and snapshots, see Amazon Elastic Block Store.

Objects are the fundamental entities stored in Amazon S3. Every object stored in Amazon
S3 is
contained in a bucket. Buckets organize the Amazon S3 namespace at the highest level
and identify
the account responsible for that storage. Amazon S3 buckets are similar to Internet
domain names.
Objects stored in the buckets have a unique key value and are retrieved using a HTTP
URL
address. For example, if an object with a key value
/photos/mygarden.jpg is stored in the
myawsbucket bucket, then it is addressable using the URL
http://myawsbucket.s3.amazonaws.com/photos/mygarden.jpg.

Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2

Given the benefits of Amazon S3 for storage, you may decide to use this service to
store
files and data sets for use with EC2 instances. There are several ways to move data
to
and from Amazon S3 to your instances. In addition to the examples discussed below,
there are
a variety of tools that people have written that you can use to access your data in
Amazon S3
from your computer or your instance. Some of the common ones are discussed in the
AWS
forums.

If you have permission, you can copy a file to or from Amazon S3 and your instance
using
one of the following methods.

AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell

Windows instances have the benefit of a graphical browser that you can use to
access the Amazon S3 console directly; however, for scripting purposes, Windows users
can
also use the AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell to move
objects to and from Amazon S3.

Use the following command to copy an Amazon S3 object to your Windows
instance.

The AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) is a unified tool to manage your AWS services.
The AWS CLI
enables users to authenticate themselves and download restricted items from Amazon
S3 and
also to upload items. For more information, such as how to install and configure the
tools, see the AWS Command Line Interface detail
page.

The aws s3 cp command is similar to the Unix
cp command. You can copy files from Amazon S3 to your instance, copy
files from your instance to Amazon S3, and copy files from one Amazon S3 location
to
another.

Use the following command to copy an object from Amazon S3 to your instance.

aws s3 cp s3://my_bucket/my_folder/my_file.extmy_copied_file.ext

Use the following command to copy an object from your instance back into Amazon S3.

aws s3 cpmy_copied_file.ext s3://my_bucket/my_folder/my_file.ext

The aws s3 sync command can synchronize an entire Amazon S3 bucket to a
local directory location. This can be helpful for downloading a data set and keeping
the
local copy up-to-date with the remote set. If you have the proper permissions on the
Amazon S3 bucket, you can push your local directory back up to the cloud when you
are
finished by reversing the source and destination locations in the command.

Use the following command to download an entire Amazon S3 bucket to a local directory
on
your instance.

aws s3 sync s3://remote_S3_bucketlocal_directory

Amazon S3 API

If you are a developer, you can use an API to access data in Amazon S3. For more
information, see the Amazon Simple Storage Service Developer Guide. You can use this API and its examples to help
develop your application and integrate it with other APIs and SDKs, such as the boto
Python interface.

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